High bar for ACA success stories

Here’s the challenge the White House faces in telling Obamacare success stories: Try to picture a headline that says, “Obamacare does what it’s supposed to do.”

Somehow, the Obama administration and its allies will have to convince news outlets to run those kinds of stories — and to give the happy newly insured the same kind of attention as the outraged complainers whose health plans were canceled because of the law.

Story Continued Below

That’s a complicated task. Loud and angry usually trumps contented and grateful when it comes to sound bites, and news organizations will have a high bar for anecdotes that reflect well on the new law, given the prevailing narrative surrounding its disastrous debut.

And yet, the success stories do exist. For all the problems with the health care rollout and the disruptions the Affordable Care Act has caused, from canceled plans to “sticker shock” from people who are disappointed with their choices, there are also people who are getting exactly what they’re supposed to get: better prices and more stable coverage of their pre-existing conditions.

So the administration and congressional Democrats are trying to spread the word of the “Obamacare winners” in any way they can, looking for the formula that will help those anecdotes compete with the “victim” stories — and give the media a hook that’s compelling enough to tell the success stories without looking like they’re soft-pedaling the law’s problems.

The catch, of course, is that the problems with the rollout are sure to continue, and they’ll get plenty of attention when they do. It’s also a rule of storytelling that the unexpected always makes a better story — and “people couldn’t keep their health plans because of Obamacare” is always going to be a twist that commands more coverage than “people gain health coverage because of Obamacare.”

Even if the Obama administration succeeds in steering more attention to the successes, like the people with pre-existing conditions who are getting better deals now, that may not make a big difference to the mindset of the majority of Americans who already have health insurance through the workplace, who just want to make sure their own coverage won’t be affected.

Middle-class Americans have now “gotten the impression, rightly or wrongly, that they’re going to be worse off” because of the effort to help sick people, said Robert Blendon, an expert on health care public opinion at Harvard University. “The stories have to be about middle-class people who have better coverage, who are paying less, and who already had coverage prior to Jan. 1. … Those stories may be less exciting, but those are the stories that are going to move the needle.”

Democratic strategists, however, are convinced that the natural cycles of media coverage will allow the success stories to gain some traction, since the period from October to December was so completely dominated by the storyline of the broken website and the disruptions to people who already had individual health insurance.

News organizations don’t want to look one-sided, so “since the media spent a lot of time digging out stories of canceled plans, we assume they’ll make the same effort to dig out other people who have been helped,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman.

Mike McCurry, who served as White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton, agreed that news organizations might feel a need to “even the score” — but added that it will be a huge challenge to reverse the “failed rollout” narrative and that the White House should expect their efforts to be hit and miss.

“Communicating the positive is always a challenge but you take it one day at a time and try and invent a new angle every day, which I am sure the White House will do … some days the press will buy it, other days not, but batting above .350 is always good,” McCurry wrote in an email.

The White House has been holding daily press calls featuring people who have gotten health insurance at better prices than they used to have. Democratic leaders have been encouraging rank-and-file lawmakers to circulate their own stories, including ones that have been collected by Senate offices and outside groups. Enroll America, a coalition of groups that has been promoting the law, has been collecting success stories and making people available to the media to talk about their new coverage.

“We don’t expect this effort to solve the challenges we face with the public’s perception of the Affordable Care Act, but this will provide the administration and the law’s supporters on the Hill the opportunity to do something for the first time: give Americans the chance to speak firsthand about being able to buy quality, affordable insurance because of the Affordable Care Act,” said one White House official. “And in the coming weeks and months, as more Americans buy insurance and see their coverage kick in, we will continue to find opportunities to help share their experiences.”

So far, the results have been mixed. A Friday White House press call, featuring a Florida lawyer who chatted at great length about his new Obamacare coverage, got a writeup in the Miami Herald — but a Georgia woman who talked about her coverage on a similar call got just a passing mention in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Enroll America has had some success promoting newly insured people, and new Twitter accounts like “ACA Success Stories” have been circulating stories as well.

But before the latest campaign was launched, congressional Democrats have made mostly clumsy efforts, when they’ve made them at all. They’ve told vague, unverifiable stories of constituents with first names, but no last names, writing letters about how happy they are with their coverage. And they’ve told those anecdotes at congressional hearings, where the stories disappeared without a trace behind all the testimony about the rollout problems.

That’s a far cry from the aggressive way Republicans and conservative organizations approached the “victim” stories, talking up every canceled-plan story they could find and setting up online strategies to collect others, like tea party websites and Glenn Beck’s #InsuranceCanceled hashtag. (And some people promoted their own stories, reaching out to POLITICO with their canceled-plan and “sticker shock” problems without any prompting.)

“It’s like the ACA and its benefits have been the best-kept secret in the world,” said Rita Rizzo of Akron, Ohio, who recently gained health coverage with her husband, Lou Vincent, who has been uninsured for nearly a decade because of his pre-existing conditions. “They should have given it to [Edward] Snowden — then we’d get the word out.”